What Is There To Say?
Yglesias argues that Obama should emphasize foreign policy issues more in the closing weeks of the campaign, and he does so in an article that is entirely free of any consideration of substantive differences (or lack thereof) between Obama and McCain except as it relates to Iraq. Holding talks with the Iranian government is all very well, but when you consider that the goals of Obama’s Iran policy are indistinguishable from McCain’s goals it isn’t entirely clear why Obama would want to emphasize that he holds nearly identical views on Iran with the man whom he has been castigating as the third term of a deeply unpopular President.
Obama’s response to the war in Georgia was more measured and sane, at least at first, until he was gradually bullied by more hawkish advisors to spout boilerplate about Russian aggression and reviewing U.S.-Russian ties. Obama’s position on NATO expansion remains every bit as foolish and reckless as McCain’s. When the Bush administration inexcusably called off the planned cooperation with Russia on civilian nuclear energy to “punish” Moscow, Obama, who has leaned heavily on his collaboration with Lugar on nonproliferation and securing loose nukes as evidence of his preparedness, hardly uttered a word about it if he said anything at all. One area where the candidates differ, Pakistan, is the one where Obama probably does not want to explain why he favors and McCain opposes unilateral actions that the elected government of a major allied state considers unacceptable. Obama could talk more about foreign policy as Election Day nears, but except for talking about Iraq what would he say that would not sound like an echo of John McCain?
Obama sounds so much like an Ivy League pansy that people think he’s some kind of peacenik, forgetting that some warmongers speak in polysyllables and live in Hyde Park mansions rather than caves.
Wouldn’t it be fair to point out that Obama is under the most pressure of any candidate to “thread the needle” WRT foreign policy and the voting public? He is, after all, the only party with a large body of chain emails circulating claiming he’s Muslim (and Grumpy Old Men calling him a pansy.) Meanwhile, many in his party are nearly as unrealistic as the neocons, and the voting public at large thinks Saddam did 9/11.
Not to say Obama would be great at international affairs; I imagine that he would be generally ineffectual. But his actual foreign policy is probably a bit of a mystery at this point, and he could do little else and have a chance at being elected.
That’s probably true. He is especially constrained to adopt hawkish and status quo views because he was identified early on as an antiwar candidate, which makes it that much harder for him to stake out new positions on anything else, and I don’t doubt that the false Muslim rumors make it even harder to change policies relating to Muslim countries and to Israel. Incredibly, the percentage of people who think he is a Muslim has gone *up* over the course of the year, and according to Pew it is now at 13% overall and 20% among McCain supporters.
The pattern in his career has also been to accommodate himself to the establishment’s views in order to help advance himself, and as I have said below he wants to become part of the establishment and so has incentives not to rock the boat at least until after the election. I don’t think he has many inclinations to rock the boat as a general rule. As a matter of temperament, he likes consensus-building and avoids confrontation, and challenging the status quo on foreign policy in a thoroughgoing way would involve far too much confrontation.
But this gets back to what I was saying. Obama may have reasons why he cannot break with the status quo more than he has, but that drives home how limited his options are in using foreign policy in the last weeks of the campaign. It is fair to note that he is hemmed in on some of these issues, but then he has probably internalized most of the conventional views that he holds and thinks that they are reasonable. I don’t think he supports NATO expansion into the Caucasus because he is concerned about appearing “weak” on Russia policy, for example, but because he buys into the propaganda that NATO is supposed to be a post-9/11 club of “democracies” and that it is not any longer an anti-Russian alliance. The Georgia situation was a good example of how Obama’s better instincts were pretty quickly overcome by the perceived need to strike an anti-Russian pose. If Obama has to spend his entire term overcompensating against the (bizarre) perception that he is too dovish, that could conceivably wind up being worse than a naturally belligerent McCain who feels he has nothing to prove. Then again, McCain is simply temperamental and dangerous, so that’s not a bet I’d want to make.
I didn’t mean, of course, that Obama is literally a pansy, however one interprets that term. I meant that he’s given to convoluted and highfalutin’ ways of saying things, and sounds a bit effete to some. I find his style of speaking to be a considerable improvement over most of our pols.
My inartfully presented point was that because BHO sounds thoughtful, a certain kind of observer assumes he must be a warm and fuzzy internationalist who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
That, as Daniel points out, ain’t necessarily so. Indeed, to prove he’s just as tough as the guys on the corner, he may well get us into scrapes his better nature might incline him to avoid.
Ah, Grumpy, I think I misread you. I agree with both you and Daniel on the situation, but I suspect that a lot of the considerable pressure on Obama would be released upon election to the White House. What he is fighting right now is partisanship and wild speculation; the latter is at least a little easier to fight once he invalidates it with actual policies.
Free of that pressure, I suspect he’d drift toward a fairly conservative (true conservative) foreign policy. The guy is nothing if not deliberative. Again, this is not full-bodied endorsement, just acceptance.
Username, from your lips to God’s ear.
My glass is often half empty, but it would be nice for it to be half-full every now and then.
It occurs to me that the word “pansy” comes from the name of the little flower, which in turn derives from the French pensée meaning “thought.” Hence one who sounds like a pansy to some can claim the impression is merely a result of the profundity of his ruminations, which are not in the least epicene.
‘Hence one who sounds like a pansy to some can claim the impression is merely a result of the profundity of his ruminations, which are not in the least epicene.
‘
Now you sound like a pansy. :-)
‘If Obama has to spend his entire term overcompensating against the (bizarre) perception that he is too dovish’
I could live with that. I’m worried he’s going to spend his term being Clintonized and defending himself from character attacks. The fight to win the White House for the republicans in 2012 will start Jan 01 2009.